Intelligent Process Automation (IPA) is the ideal solution to address the concerns of finance and accounting personnel, as it enables organisations to reduce the manual elements of invoice processing through automation; improving processing times, minimising errors, but most importantly freeing up staff to complete more rewarding tasks such as conflict resolution and relationship building.
IPA constitutes a wide variety of technology applications (for further information on IPA and other technologies, a glossary of terms can be found here), which can be used alone or in combination to automate certain tasks or end-to-end business processes. It is important for organisations to understand their individual use case and associated business case in order to identify which technologies will deliver the highest return on investment and therefore success.
For larger organisations, particularly at an enterprise level, where 100,000s of different supplier invoices are received on a daily basis, it may be more effective to deploy a Machine Learning (ML) solution. This technology enables the automated processing of a much wider and unpredictable variety of invoice structures because of its ability to learn. For example, Celaton’s inSTREAM™ Intelligent Document Processing (IDP) platform uses AI and ML to cope with variances in invoice formats. inSTREAM learns through the natural consequence of processing documents along with ‘Human in the Loop’ where the platform collaborates with AP Clerks to enhance its learning. inSTREAM learns from every transaction it processes, therefore as the volume of documents increases, its confidence and accuracy improve to a point where Straight Through Processing (STP) is achieved. In addition, immediate scale and growth are enabled due to inSTREAM’s ability to continually learn without the need for additional programming.
